FreeType is a free, high-quality, portable font engine that can open andmanage font files. It also loads, hints, and renders individual glyphsefficiently. These packages provide both the FreeType 1 and FreeType 2font engines.

Tavis Ormandy of the Google Security Team discovered several integeroverflow flaws in the FreeType 2 font engine. If a user loaded acarefully-crafted font file with an application linked against FreeType 2,it could cause the application to crash or, possibly, execute arbitrarycode with the privileges of the user running the application.(CVE-2009-0946)

Chris Evans discovered multiple integer overflow flaws in the FreeType fontengine. If a user loaded a carefully-crafted font file with an applicationlinked against FreeType, it could cause the application to crash or,possibly, execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user runningthe application. (CVE-2006-1861)

An integer overflow flaw was found in the way the FreeType font engineprocessed TrueType® Font (TTF) files. If a user loaded a carefully-craftedfont file with an application linked against FreeType, it could cause theapplication to crash or, possibly, execute arbitrary code with theprivileges of the user running the application. (CVE-2007-2754)

A flaw was discovered in the FreeType TTF font-file format parser when theTrueType virtual machine Byte Code Interpreter (BCI) is enabled. If a userloaded a carefully-crafted font file with an application linked againstFreeType, it could cause the application to crash or, possibly, executearbitrary code with the privileges of the user running the application.(CVE-2008-1808)

The CVE-2008-1808 flaw did not affect the freetype packages as distributedin Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4, as they are not compiled with TrueTypeBCI support. A fix for this flaw has been included in this update as usersmay choose to recompile the freetype packages in order to enable TrueTypeBCI support. Red Hat does not, however, provide support for modified andrecompiled packages.

Users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which containbackported patches to correct these issues. The X server must be restarted(log out, then log back in) for this update to take effect.

4. Solution:

Before applying this update, make sure that all previously-releasederrata relevant to your system have been applied.